World : NAPTIN now Africa’s Excellence Centre

The National Power Training Institute of Nigeria (NAPTIN) has been named a Centre of Excellence (CoE) in power sector training in Africa by the African Network of Centres of Excellence in Electricity (ANCEE).

With this, NAPTIN is now a member of ANCEE, a pan-African initiative led by the Association of Power Utilities of Africa (APUA) and supported by the Agence Francaise Development (AFD), African Development Bank (ADB), European Union (EU) and other international development partners.

NAPTIN’s acting Director General, Mr Ahmed Bolaji Nagode, during the signing of a pact for the admittance at its headquarter in Abuja last weekend, said the conferment made the institute the only CoE in West Africa and one of the eight power training centres in Africa.

Mr Nagode also said the institute was collaborating with the West African Power Pool (WAPP) to train workforce in the power sector of Liberia while APUA is sponsoring the training of 42 power workers of Ghana utility, and facilitate another for workers in the utility of Mali.

He said: “We have the opportunity to train staff of power utilities in Africa in our training centres. Through this programme, we are going to equally realise foreign exchange in terms of selling our products to power utilities in Africa and APUA will definitely pay for these.”

The Director General of APUA, Dr. Abel Didier Tella, at the event confirmed the standards at NAPTIN saying, “During the assessment, what we saw in Nigeria is farther than what we can imagine.”

Dr. Tella also noted that NAPTIN is unique among the eight CoEs in Africa, “because all other centres like those in Egypt, Tunisia, Ivory Coast and South Africa are all part of a utility firm, but NAPTIN is a standalone institute.”

He said with the admission into APUA, NAPTIN is now enabled to train power sector workers in French apart from English language with the first being workers in Ghana and Mali.